Plugins 018 – WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the WP Greet Box WordPress plugin.

The WP Greet Box plugin adds a welcome box to the top of your blog post and/or pages based on where the visitor came from. The box can be extensively customized and special greetings can be added. The plugin is useful if you wish to help new users find additional content on your blog as well as encourage visitors to subscribe to your feed or tweet the blog post they are currently viewing.

Features include:

  • Extensive list of greetings for sites such as Google, Yahoo search, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…
  • Ability to add custom greetings and greeting icons
  • Open links in greeting box in new browser windows option
  • Display related posts within your welcome boxes to help visitor find additional relevant content
  • Import/Export options
  • Extensive documentation to add greetings to your WordPress theme

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the WP Greet Box plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/.

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WordPress 2.8 Upgrade WYSIWYG TinyMCE Google Gears Bug

If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and you’ve noticed that your friendly post editor (WYSIWYG by TinyMCE) no longer appears, you must likely have Google Gears enabled for your site. The Javascript error console includes a line number error and when viewing the script source, unreadable binary characters are present.

To fix, remove your site from the list of sites Google Gears is enabled. To do this from Firefox, click the “Tools” pull down menu and select “Gears Settings”. Click ‘remove’ for the sites listed that are having the problem.

From my research, I’ve discovered that Google Gears Caches files locally without regard to javascript errors, cleared browser cache or taking into account the query strings in the URLs.  It may be too complicated for Google Gears to detect javascript errors, but it should detect when the cache has been cleared in a browser in my opinion. More importantly, when the URL changes, e.g. from /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141 to /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141&change=1), Google Gears should treat this new URL link differently, as the query string may tell the server to send back a completely different code.Google Gears Developers: Please treat the URL including the query string as separate files to be cached in Google Gears.

The only way I could see WordPress developers from preventing this from happening in the future is to rename the wp-tinymce.php file for every release. There may be some documentation for Google Gears as well to tell it to upgrade all of the locally cached files.

Plugins 017 – Interview Paul Kehrer Part 2 CDN Tools & Fidgetr

This episode we continue our interview with Paul Kehrer. Paul has written 4 plugins, 2 of which are publicly available called CDN Tools and Fidgetr plugins, both available at wordpress.org.

Please click for part 1 of this 2 part interview.

In part 2 of this 2 part interview we continue talking about tips for WordPress developers. Paul recommends WordPress plugin developers check out Adam Brown‘s web site for his extensive documentation of the actions and hooks  (Adam Brown’s wp_hooks) in WordPress. We go on to discuss the subversion repository provided by WordPress.org. We reflect on the old and new WordPress plugin search web site as well as discuss the problem when plugins haven’t been updated for the latest builds of WordPress.

To learn more about Paul Kehrer and his plugins, please visit swearingscience.com.

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Plugins 016 – Interview Paul Kehrer Part 1 CDN Tools & Fidgetr

This episode we interview Paul Kehrer, a WordPress user and plugin developer. Paul has written 4 plugins, 2 of which are publicly available called CDN Tools and Fidgetr plugins, both available at wordpress.org.

In part 1 of this 2 part interview we talk about developing plugins, web development, HTML5, as well as discussing open source software. Paul is an open source veteran and co-developed the popular MySQLTuner application written in Perl.

We discuss other plugins such as WP Super Cache, WP-Syntax,

Near the end of part 1, Paul discusses tips for other WordPress plugin developers.

Part two will be available next week, stay tuned

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Plugins 015 – Subscribe to Comments Plugin

Today we’re covering the  Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin.

The Subscribe to Comments WP plugin allows comment contributors to receive email notifications when additional comments are left for the specified blog post. This is a great way to encourage both comment contribution and increase your returning visits to your web site.

Features include:

  • Customize From email address and name
  • Users who do not leave comments can subscribe to comments
  • Customize the messages shown to comment author, subscribers and unsubscribed users
  • Customize styling for subscription manager pages
  • Add your own custom header, footer and sidebar (for advanced users)

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any (Creating customized header, footer and sidebar Plugins Skill Level: Advanced)

To learn more about the Subscribe to Comments plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/.

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